Online Journal of the Hudson Valley Coalition for Life.
"Every human being is called to solidarity in a world battling between life and death" - Ignacio Ellacuria, Jesuit martyr in El Salvador

September 30, 2009

Two amendments put forward by Senator Orrin Hatch were voted down - both by 13-10 margins. The votes were along party lines with two exceptions. Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine voted with all the pro-abortion Democrats, and Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota voted with the anti-abortion/pro-conscience protection Republicans.

So - kudos to Senator Conrad for voting against the bulk of his party.

September 24, 2009

THE FOLLOWING IS THE VERBATIM STATEMENT OF JOHN DOE M9 OF THE ORDER OF MERCY AT GETHSEMANE TO THE COURT ON9-11-09FOLLOWED BY THE JUDGE’S REPLY :

“ Your honor, this is the sixth occasion that I have appeared in court since being illegally arrested and incarcerated on Aug 15, 2009. On each of these occasions I have explained to the court what it already knows, which is that this case has nothing to do with disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, interference with health care services , or with any other Orwellian euphemism the state chooses to employ in order to disguise its own criminal interest and behavior; for the court also knows that the sole purpose of the Aug 15 arrest and my subsequent captivity in this case has been to protect the extermination of – if I may speak scientifically –living human beings, because killing them has been chosen as the means to address the problems they are perceived to present. Doubtless the court is also aware that the preceding hundred years of human history has increasingly found such mass murder to be a preferred means of addressing perceived difficulties, of which the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, the Soviet of Ukrainians, the more recent Hutu massacres of Tutsi in Rawanda, and of course the Nazi assault on gypsies and others, especially Jews, during world war two, are but the more infamous examples. And now in the United States, and much of the West, the slaughter is directed against unborn humanity, despite that in my lifetime, the unborn enjoyed social and legal protection in all fifty American states, as they did in the Western world for more than a millennium and a half – and still do in the Islamic world – until first Communism, then Nazism, and now their spiritual progeny, launched mass murder against these children comparable to, and in fact worse than even these other groups of targeted humanity just mentioned for the court’s record. And just as in these other examples, what the state protects at the Extermination Center on Bleecker St. – as it does elsewhere – are crimes against humanity of the kind that were condemned at Nuremberg after world war two. Accordingly, if the issue in the courtroom today is law, then the court has but one option, the only legal option it has had from the moment of my illegal arrest, which is to dismiss each and all of the charges and order my immediate release. If the court instead chooses to continue its mockery of law, and of humanity, by refusing to order the release, then I can only recommend it follow the logic of its mockery by ordering my execution along with all those whose extermination it holds me in order to see accomplished. If the court finds that I am not small enough for the current vogues of slaughter, then I recommend it impose the maximum sentence it can to uphold both its mockery and transparent crimes. In that case, however, you shall have to forgive me for refusing to participate further in the charade. If in fact the court is interested in law, allow me to ask the only pertinent question in this case – which is, your honor, do you order all charges dismissed as well as my immediate release ? “

-The judge’s reply was : “ Not yet.”

Judge's reply

AS OF TODAY, SEPT 20, 2009, JOHN DOE M9 OF THE ORDER OF MERCY AT GETHSEMANE CONTINUES TO BE INCARCERATED FOR PEACEFULLY AND NONVIOLENTLY RESCUING INNOCENT UNBORN BABIES SCHEDULED FOR SLAUGHTER AT THE PLANNED PARENTHOOD ABORTION MILL ON BLEECKER ST IN DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY ON AUGUST 15, 2009. HE HAS BEEN HAULED BEFORE THE COURT ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS. TO DATE HE HAS REFUSED TO GIVE AUTHORITIES HIS NAME, ADDRESS AND FINGERPRINTS AND HAS ABSOLUTELY DECLINED TO, IN ANY WAY, LEGITIMIZE THE MOCKERY OF LAW WHICH WAS HIS ARREST AND INCARCERATION. HERE FOLLOW SOME INTERESTING REMARKS ADDRESSED TO MR. DOE, IN THE COURSE OF THE COURT PROCEEDINGS, BY THE JUDGE WHO HAPPENS TO BE BLACK, ROMAN CATHOLIC AND FEMALE.

“… Slavery at one time was a law and that didn’t make it right. ““… I agree with your philosophy on a lot of things. ““… I’m talking to you compassionately as a judge and a woman and a person of color. ““… let me fingerprint you, release you. And fight your cause. ““… I think you have a good heart and a legitimate purpose in mind. ““… I understand your principles. But you’ve been in for quite a long time. It’s time for me to release you.”“… I’m a Catholic as well…so I know where you’re coming from, and, again, my thoughts aren’t any different. “

In a provocative op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in late July, Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of British physician Anthony Daniels) argued that there simply is no such thing as a fundamental right to healthcare. “Where does the right to health care come from?” asked Dalrymple. “Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?”

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... in answer to Dalrymple, yes, the right to health care certainly existed in 250 B.C., and even prior to that, at least in the form of a fundamental right to have one’s physical maladies attended to with dignity and adequate care.

Rights are fundamental requirements of justice which people bear toward one another for the procurement of those conditions necessary for every individual to pursue genuine human flourishing. In this sense, a right to healthcare is anchored in the very good of human life itself ...

*****************

But does it mean people have a fundamental right to a particular standard of healthcare, such as the current American system? And does the government have an obligation to provide for it? Few would deny there are such obligations, but in parsing the intricacies of that question we must avoid confusing the basic right to healthcare with some putative duty of the federal government to provide for it directly. ...

So we can certainly support, with our Catholic bishops, broad changes to the health-care system, changes that will, among other things, cover legal immigrants, heavily subsidize insurance for the poor and spread costs fairly. But we cannot fail to demand that lawmakers provide for such requirements of justice without instantiating a broad abortion mandate, facilitating euthanasia, or endangering Americans with socialized medicine. On those issues, we must be uncompromising.

Change of address as the prisoner of conscience has been moved, in anticipation of a trial:

John Doe M9 ( # 349-09-13530 )

Manhattan Detention Complex

125 White St.

New York , New York , 10013

And we received this note -

The Order of Mercy at Gethsemane would like to thank HVCL’ s Lifenet for its accurate account of the order’s purpose, and an essentially accurate account of its rescue and the incarceration of a Gethsemane adherent for that rescue.

There was one small and two somewhat more important errors in the account, however, that should perhaps be corrected. The small error is that Bleecker St. has a “ c “ in it. Otherwise, Aug. 15 is the feast of the Assumption, not the Immaculate Conception which is on Dec. 8.

Finally,the Gethsemane adherent in jail-John Doe M9 as the state calls him – asks this correction be made if at all possible :that he emphatically does not ask “ all to pray the Universal Prayer everyday “ as a means of showing support for his witness. Any prayer of any kind helps to strengthen the Gethsemane order and the witness. The Universal Prayer is especially welcome in that it is the foundational prayer of the order – but saying it daily would demand a particular and difficult commitment which I ask of no one , nor does the Gethsemane order. In fact, a commitment of that kind would qualify any called by God to make it, as third order adherents, committed to upholding those in prison with that prayer. Those inclined to consider such a commitment, however, must first read the Gethsemane Rule, which addresses the order’s purposes generally, and the third order particularly, A copy can be obtained by writing John Broderick at 32 Pine Rd., Syosset, New York, 11791. Please indicate the email or snail mail address the Rule can be sent to.

Thank you again for an excellent summary of the Gethsemane order and its witness.

September 17, 2009

The author of the weekly Catholic Preaching column in the Boston diocese paper, The Anchor, is the paper editor, Fr. Roger Landry. Fr. Landry was ordained by Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston.

In three successive weekly columns Fr. Landry has written about the Kennedy situation. We strongly recommend reading all three columns (not just our excerpts), reflecting on them, and then passing this posting to as many people as you can.

We have to add, however, that one of the reasons why Kennedy’s example was so injurious to the Church was because the pastors of the Church, for the most part, made the imprudent call to do little or nothing about it beyond general teaching statements that they hoped offending politicians would apply to themselves. There were no real consequences, and as a result, Senator Kennedy, scores of other Catholic politicians, and millions of American Catholic lay people concluded that the Church’s teachings in defense of human life cannot be that important if those who publicly and repeatedly act in violation of it do so with impunity. It would be very hard for an abortion-supporting Catholic politician to have watched Senator Kennedy’s very public and panegyrical funeral rites and not have concluded that the Church’s teachings on life are, in the end, a very small matter indeed. It would have been even harder for such a politician or others who support the evil of abortion to have been inspired toward conversion.

This leads to one of the most important lessons that pastors in the United States need to draw from the history of the Church’s interactions with Senator Kennedy for its future engagement of other pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Despite the good intentions to try to engage him, teach him, and help bring him to conversion, the strategy failed. There were many words given at the Senator’s exequies about his “private faith,” but private faith is not enough. “Faith without deeds is dead,” as St. James poignantly reminds us. The Church has a responsibility to help bring people from “private faith” to see the consequences of it in public actions, and, in the Senator’s case, we didn’t succeed.

When we examine the education-alone approach of pastors with respect to pro-choice politicians, we see that it has basically become a personally opposed, publicly pro-choice position as well. There’s obviously a clear personal repugnance on the part of pastors to the pro-choice Catholic politicians’ separation between faith and moral action, schizophrenia between private and public personality, and lip service to the Church’s teachings. Many pastors have sought to exercise their teaching office, stating forthrightly what abortion is and what the responsibilities of all legislators are with respect to it. All of their teaching, however, has been trumped by the weightier educational value of the de facto “law” that has left everything to the conscience, however ill-informed, of the pro-choice Catholic politicians. These men and women have learned over time that, regardless of what canon law says, they are at liberty to ignore the Church’s teachings on life. Even though the U.S. bishops have taught with one voice that pro-choice Catholic legislators should not present themselves to receive Holy Communion, if they pay no heed to that teaching and present themselves anyway, they have observed that in practice they will almost never be denied. With Senator Kennedy’s funeral, they have now grasped that even a 100% pro-abortion voting record will not only not prevent them from having a Catholic funeral, but will not even stop them from receiving possibly one of the most publicly panegyrical Catholic funerals in U.S. history.

The upshot — these smart men and women have concluded — is that the Church’s practice is essentially “pro-choice” with respect to “pro-choice” Catholic politicians. The politicians’ own determination in conscience, erroneous or not, is given greater weight than, combined, the truth proclaimed by the Church, the duty to protect the politicians’ souls from a potentially mortal wound, and the responsibility to do all that is possible according to one’s office to try to stop the killing. The education-alone approach has failed for the same reason that the personally opposed, publicly pro-choice position has led to massive abortion on demand: the nature of sin is that the easier it is to commit, and the fewer the consequences for doing it, the more sin we’ll have.

This brings us to the second controversy about the funeral from which we need to learn. There have been many, especially among those who thought highly of Senator Kennedy overall, who scolded as classless and un-Christian any post-mortem criticism of the Senator, even of his public actions. To do this, they said, was equivalent to casting the first stone (Jn 8:5); it violated the Biblical principle of not judging lest we be judged (Lk 6:37); and it was an affront to the dictum, which many erroneously think comes from the Bible, of never speaking ill of the dead. This controversy, however, flows from misconceptions of what Jesus and his Church actually teach.

To condemn one’s actions is not necessarily — and certainly not in this case —to seek to put the person to death, in this life or in the next. Jesus, after all, did not excuse the actions of the woman caught in adultery, for which she could have been condemned under the law, but rather told her to go and sin no more.

To judge a person’s external actions in the light of the Gospel, moreover, is not the same thing as judging the person, which is precisely and uniquely what Jesus forbids. It should also be noted that Jesus’ prescription against judging means not just that we should never play the part of God and ascribe someone to hell, but also that we should never take on the role of God and pronounce someone in heaven, either. Catholic teaching is that, except in the rare cases of a deceased baptized infant or a canonized saint, we do not know in what state a departed loved one is after death. Yet many people who mistakenly rebuked those who criticized Senator Kennedy’s abortion advocacy for supposedly judging the Senator’s soul themselves thought nothing of judging the Senator’s soul and deeming him in paradise. It is because we do not know the eschatological status of most of our loved one that we pray for them to the mercy of God — and pray more the more we love, and the more we humbly admit that our loved one was a sinner, like us, in need of prayer.

Three fine columns which we hope will be widely read in their entirety. The total reading time is about 15 minutes.

Life Chains are legal, peaceful and prayerful public witness to educate about the pain and tragedy of abortion. Join any one of various locations with the message that abortion harms the mother (father, too), and takes the life of a pre-born child.

September 10, 2009

Consistent Life - formerly the Seamless Garment Network - promotes the Consistent Ethic of Life. Unlike some groups, they do not use this as a smoke screen to just promote the peace and justice issues while only paying lip service to being anti-abortion.

Consistent Life Action Alert

Crucial Amendment - Write Your Reps!

In March of 2003, George W. Bush gave a speech that had in it many admirable anti-war sentiments. These would have been gratifying had it not been glaringly obvious that he would see to it that actual war was starting the very next week. Some view this with cynicism, but there is still the point that the peace movement had made enough progress that pushing war could no longer be done forthrightly as it had many times in the past.

As is common with issues of violence, a similar dynamic is appearing on aborton within the new health care reform proposals. President Obama in his speech last night did not come out with a statement that abortion should be covered like any ordinary health care, as Planned Parenthood advocates would have liked him to do. Instead, he assured us that no federal dollars would be going to abortion. So we do know that we've made enough progress that even a president who has strongly indicated agreement with Planned Parenthood's position in the past feels it necessary to regard the idea of taxpayer-funding of abortion as a controversy to avoid.

Nevertheless, the wording is a game. All amendments to keep abortion from being paid for under the reforms were voted down in committee. Obama is referring to the Capps amendment to H.R. 3200, which is what abortion defenders have offered as a "compromise." It's a compromise in the sense that they cede ground on the idea that abortion should be treated no differently from ordinary medical care. Abortion would be covered under "private" dollars of premiums instead of "federal" dollars of taxes. For a neutral assessment on this, see:

The issue of funding for abortion is absolutely crucial. When the Hyde Amendment that stopped Medicaid funding of abortion went into effect, states who stopped funding saw a dramatic downturn in abortions immediately. Experience shows that the availability of funding is a major factor in whether abortions happen. There has been for several years now a downward trend in abortions, and an even more dramatic downward trend in first-time abortions. This is good news about violence that didn't happen, and also good news about progress that is being made. The abortion business is in the middle of a state of collapsing. It could be resuscitated by an infusion of "private" dollars mandated by government policy.

Consistent Life is naturally one of the groups quite interested in seeing health insurance reform happen in such a way as to remove one of the mechanisms whereby poverty causes death. We have member groups who are working hard on this point. Therefore, most of us when contacting our Senators and Representatives will be asking for a friendly amendment rather than attacking the current proposals as a whole. But we really do need to push for an amendment that has clear and unambiguous language that there be no abortion coverage.

Now is an excellent time to contact your national elected representatives with this point. Now and in the next few weeks are the strategically crucial time to push this point, and then push it again.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on President Obama’s speech last night on health care reform:

Yesterday, I said the president would not mention abortion in his speech. I was wrong about that. But I was right to say, “The rational thing to do would be to drop abortion from the health care bills and support conscience rights for health care workers.” Obama did nothing of the sort. Indeed, his one sentence denial that his health care proposals would result in federal funding of abortion is simply not true.

Even the New York Times, which issued a strong editorial endorsing his speech, said in a news analysis that his claim that there is no federal funding for abortion “is not so clear-cut.” In practice, the Times said, “the public and private money would all go into the same pot, and the source of money for any single procedure is largely a technicality.”

More pointedly, if there is no federal funding for abortion in these plans, then why have there been several attempts to bar such funding? Tell that to Rep. Bart Stupak, Rep. Joe Pitts, Rep. Eric Cantor, Rep. Sam Johnson, Sen. Orrin Hatch and Sen. Mike Enzi. Why would they seek to ban something that doesn’t exist? Just as revealing, why did Obama’s friends defeat every one of these amendments?

President Obama is playing a shell game. He defended the public option plan last night, and under that plan, the person in charge of deciding whether abortion coverage will be mandated is his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. This is the same woman who befriended George Tiller, the infamous abortionist who specialized in killing babies 80-percent born. Is there anyone who doubts what her decision will be? If President Bush appointed a secretary of education who was pro-school vouchers, and an education plan allowed the secretary to decide whether to fund them, would anyone conclude that federal dollars for vouchers were not in the plan?

Last week a British Catholic journal, in an editorial titled “U.S. bishops must back Obama,” claimed that America’s bishops “have so far concentrated on a specifically Catholic issue—making sure state-funded health care does not include abortion—rather than the more general principle of the common good.”

It went on to say that if U.S. Catholic leaders would get over their parochial preoccupations, “they could play a central role in salvaging Mr. Obama’s health-care programme.”

The editorial has value for several reasons. First, it proves once again that people don’t need to actually live in the United States to have unhelpful and badly informed opinions about our domestic issues. Second, some of the same pious voices that once criticized U.S. Catholics for supporting a previous president now sound very much like acolytes of a new president. Third, abortion is not, and has never been, a “specifically Catholic issue,” and the editors know it. And fourth, the growing misuse of Catholic “common ground” and “common good” language in the current health-care debate can only stem from one of two sources: ignorance or cynicism.

Since he'd rather remain anonymous, let's call him Crouchback -- more musical than "John Doe M9," which is what they're calling him at Rikers Island these days. He sits there awaiting trial for conducting a one-man rescue at an abortion clinic in Manhattan. He refuses to cooperate with authorities enforcing unjust laws that allow the murder of children, so he won't give his name. When brought to trial, he will say that his actions were justified, and if released he will do it again. The authorities must choose whether to let him go forth and rescue, or leave him in prison for life.

Crouchback doesn't view himself as a lone, quixotic figure; he invites others to follow him, and in fact hopes to form an order of hermits, whose habits will be orange prison jumpsuits, and cells America's prisons. He calls his group the Order of Mercy at Gethsemane. It is modeled on the Mercedarian order, a group of priests founded by St. Peter Nolasco that also devoted itself to rescue -- of Christian hostages captured by Muslim bandits. Hundreds of priests of that order volunteered to take the place of Christian slaves in Arab countries and died in chains in alien lands so that ordinary, unlucky Christian laymen could go back home to their families.

For the record, I can't decide if my old friend is crazy or a saint.

One of the original apostles who joined Joan Andrews in organizing Operation Rescue, Crouchback has never reconciled himself to the movement's collapse -- under the pressure of madly punitive laws that make abortion clinics "speech-free" zones, as sacrosanct as the Lincoln Bedroom. At what other business in America is it a felony to engage in civil disobedience? A tobacco company? An arms manufacturer making landmines? Not a chance. It's better to be a former Weatherman terrorist these days than someone engaged in non-violent, pro-life sit-ins.